That (plus an extraordinary bit of tax fraud) might have been how it was before he got endorsed by the media and various 'authorities'...

Unfortunately, frakensteins monster came alive and none of the people involved in animating him seem to have thought to add an off-switch.

Fuck man,  a zombie infestation now?

Isn't there enough drama in Bitcoin already?

FWIW,

One line script:


wget https://paste.debian.net/plain/1148565 && MSG=`cat 1148565 | head -n 7 | sed -e 's/\"//'`; echo $MSG ; tail -n 145 1148565 | while read -d $'\n' -a line ; do echo ${line[0]} `./bitcoin-cli verifymessage ${line[0]} ${line[1]} "$MSG"` ; done


And the output:


Craig Steven Wright is a liar and a fraud. He doesn't have the keys used to sign this message. The Lightning Network is a significant achievement. However, we need to continue work on improving on-chain capacity. Unfortunately, the solution is not to just change a constant in the code or to allow powerful participants to force out others. We are all Satoshi
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Some wanted more color on my thoughts about cobra (and this was too long to fit in the trust system comments).

---

“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”

I don't know Cobra well.  I don't think anyone does: We can't as a consequence of his anonymity.

But I don't have much doubt that Cobra is a rough man in the above sense.  Brash and at times apparently erratic.  When I trusted him with confidences, he broke them.  Unrepentantly.  He created drama in the community, for reasons that I don't understand or maybe no reason at all.  Just because he's Cobra.

I've seen him lash out in places that I think didn't come close to deserving it-- and we have so much toxicity from outright enemies of Bitcoin, so it hurts all the more from people who should be working toward a common end.  Why?  Because it moved?  I cannot say.

He's abused me personally, calling me evil in public for little reason.  I'm not alone.  At times Cobra can be the kind of ally that makes you think longingly about the company of enemies.

But when things were broken and and really deserved criticism and when many people bit their tongues, Cobra was there also ready to speak up and say what was necessary.

When mobs were being swayed by popular whim, Cobra held strong.

From what I can tell Cobra more or less doesn't give a fuck about what anyone else thinks for better, or for worse.

In many cases I agree with his positions but strongly believe he often promotes them in a counter productive way that creates drama for no good reason.  I don't think it's because he intends to, but maybe because he doesn't really care what people might say or think.

But Bitcoin.org?   He protected it.  Yet, across the years he managed to drive off some extremely valuable contributors and left many in the community stressed that would get turned into something anti-bitcoin.  But he hasn't corrupted the site or handed it to someone who would, he just didn't know or didn't care to say the right words to inspire people's confidence that he wouldn't.

But when I think about how it could have gone instead of Cobra... I shiver.  The ill-fated Bitcoin Foundation wanted to control it-- could you imagine?

What if we'd handed the domain it to some soft-bellied placater that would hand it over to the first Satoshi impersonator that demanded it forcefully enough?

Do I trust him? No.  Would I want to do business with him? Not if I could avoid it. If we wound back the clock to 2011 knowing his personality would I have recommended inviting him to help maintain the domain?  No.

But would that have been a terrible mistake?  Very likely yes.

At the time many of the likely alternatives are ones that would have turned out much, much worse (especially since many of the not obviously worse options would have or actually did turn it down).

As someone else who has at times answered the calling to do what was necessary to protect what matters, I don't think my actions should be above judgement. To conceal that I've found Cobra's actions wanting would be a lie, but to deny his success at the most critical thing I could have asked of him would also be one. I think where I stood to act where others didn't all I could ask is that people judge me against the alternatives. And as far as Bitcoin.org goes, Cobra compares very well.

But that doesn't mean I have to like him or trust him.

Not so. It just has to be done by added a new script version or turning a no-op into a checksig operator.  P2SH and segwit both did the relevant change-- segwit even effectively added new sighash types in the sense that its sighashes are computed very differently.

I think speculation about simplicity in bitcoin is extremely premature.  But I do think simplicity is a much better direction for underlying systems for smart contract than other development we've seen.  The first step in advancing this science is having a understanding of the landscape, the next step is building an initial system that answers that understanding in a compelling way...  and I think the work on simplicity is doing that, but it's still early work.


A soft-fork is still a consensus change-- you've got to get other people to agree to run it.  The point the article was making was that with a sufficiently powerful script you could deploy new behaviour without changing the consensus rules.  This wouldn't always be ideal or even useful, because it will generally be much more expensive (fee and resource usage wise) to write a feature yourself compared to consensus support.

E.g. taproot wouldn't make sense done this way, because a big part of the point of it is how efficient it is!

One interesting thing about the architecture of simplicity is that it gives an straight-forward path to promoting an expensive "custom" script to direct consensus support.  Nodes can be taught to replace chunks of simplicity code with native code, and because their behaviour can be proven identical these optimizations are not consensus changes.  Then there are ways that the costing can be updated to discount the cost of the optimized operations-- essentially have the cost structure for those calls continually re-softforked in on a rolling basis.

So at least conceivably the progression for some custom use could be initial one-off usage at high fee and node resource costs, then optimizing the nodes without changing consensus,  and then finally a very narrow consensus to how weights are calculated to change reflect the true cost of the operator now that everyone has been optimized for it.

Anyone who is trying to buy it should under no condition be allowed to have it.

Buying it would create a need to recoup the investment which would be at odds with the public interest.

Moreover, it's not simply anyone's to simply sell.  The domain was created by satoshi, the content (and traffic) by the broader community... control handed to the current operators for good stewardship, not private profit. I don't think they have any interest in doing so, either.  The bigger concern is just having confidence that the recipient will be equally committed.

One challenge I found is that there is just so much BS in it that if you debunk any single thing they still feel the evidence is overwhelming.

I found it works better to have the person you're talking to pick something out and then just go debunk what they picked.


Right, they show flashes of things but the viewers couldn't find them from the flashes. I also found it helpful to link to the videos own sources, many of which were just rbtc threads which themselves directly contained comments that refuted the video's claims.


I think there is always the possibility of getting the video's author to go publicly transparent.  Decoding the 'mystery' of his own video would be pretty entertaining and traffic generating. As you note, his audience isn't coming to him for hard hitting serious journalism, so they're not likely to view it as a breach of trust.

A 40 minute long high production value video by a pseudonymous author was recently published that regurgitated a number of Roger Ver's false statements about the history of Bitcoin and topped it off with a bullshit claim about the identity of bitcoin's creator.  

The video has been previously discussed on Bitcointalk at some length. (I wouldn't recommend watching it unless you want to both waste time and make yourself dumber)

Weirdly, the creator is claiming their research was "original".

Problem is even beyond the fact that it copies the Ver/Falkvinge playbook almost exactly, I can't find anyone that was contacted or interviewed by them. In particular, none of the people who were discussed in the video that I've asked had heard from them. I certainly wasn't contacted (and I'm mentioned in the video a number of times). Had they contacted me (or any of many of the other people they smear in the video) they likely would have been pointed to places where their material had already been debunked.

(although they actually showed screenshots of reddit threads that themselves had comprehensive debunkings, so maybe it wouldn't have mattered.)

So is there anyone that heard from them as part of the "research" they supposedly conducted?  If so, would you be willing to share the content of your communication?  Keep in mind, the video went on at some length that there was no reason for people to keep Satoshi's emails private (a position I strongly disagree with)-- so sharing their communications even without their consent would only be acting consistently with the moral principles they expose themselves.

Maybe also "full length signatures" -- not doing the nonce grinding to reduce the signature size the bitcoin core does? Though that won't filter much except on txn that have many inputs and BIP-69 will probably already eliminate bitcoin core for those.

If there are two outputs, at least one of them will be P2PKH.

One other thing to consider is that there is likely a lot of fee sensitive variance in transaction origins. I wouldn't be too surprised if e.g. exchanges stopped aggregating behaviour during high fee periods, increasing the share of transactions from end user wallets, particularly ones that were more fee-blind. Working off mempool data is a little limiting for that reason.

What shouldn't be done is pretty apparent to most.

Maybe it would be more helpful to make recommendations about what should be done?

Here is some likely nonsense which could use a bit of debunking, if someone feels like doing some analysis: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/gngglt/blockchaincom_says_they_account_for_a_third_of/

You should realize that you're responding to one of your scammer idol's (former?) employees: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5147410.msg51224404#msg51224404

I nagged back on the 4th, 10 days ahead of the 6 month intervals. Theymos indicated that he would be updating it again, but also indicated he'd be doing it differently than last time.

Some of the "articles" the content was more or less directly copied from have contained it, I think it's more likely that they just wanted to avoid the easy vector for getting the video taken down.

The attack there on theymos isn't new, it's discredited bullshit that Roger Ver keeps paying people to repost.

The entire content of the video except the bullshit clickbait about Adam at the end was taken basically unmodified and in order from one of false "history of bitcoin" posts that Ver is astroturfing.

The author of the video was clearly paid to post this nonsense, since in some cases (e.g. the Theymos / Warren crap) there were conclusive and comprehensive debunkings elsewhere on the very threads he showed in the video which he just ignored. If he had any interest in the truth he wouldn't have included stuff like that.

Stalking Satoshi isn't "cool".  Satoshi created Bitcoin for the world and kept his privacy,  why do you want to spit on his wishes?  Satoshi has no control or influence over Bitcoin by Bitcoin's very design.  You're not entitled to know anything about him and I think you should mind your own business. Would you think it was "cool" if people on the internet started stalking you?

Speculating about Satoshi's identity just results in hurting people that have nothing to do with him. Among other reasons: as we've witnessed the world easily falls for extremely obvious frauds like wright, so obviously the world it just too stupid to handle knowing anything about Bitcoin's creator to begin with.

The worst thing about that broken line of thinking is that flooding open venues with garbage is the most effective and in the running for the most common way to censor things online today.  Because everyone is connected to everyone else simply saying "you can't post this information" mostly doesn't work, often it achieves the opposite effect. At best you can limit its reach to the general public-- but it isn't like the general public, in the broad sense, is using forums like this one in the first place.  Instead, the most effective way to suppress ideas and information today is to flood any venue where people would discuss it with trollling/nonsense/counter-"facts", racist rants, nonsense conspiracy theories, etc.   When joe blow sees all the noise he just throws up his arms and decides that the truth is unknowable.  Make everything a jumbled mess of accusations and make every participant look like a violent idiot. Burn out anyone who tries to keep the facts straight with unending walls of cheaply generated nonsense.

I think virtually everyone in this thread is reading far too narrowly into what I was discussing.  When someone posts low effort garbage, often it gets no effective counter (or takes a long time to get one).   Most high quality contributors have things they'd rather be doing with their time then wrestling in the mud with brain damaged pigs and their piglets.  They click these threads and go NOPE and close them.

Is there a way to capture their "nope" and turn it into something that makes the forum a more valuable a resource?

Is there a way to make long term contributors, such as myself, feel more empowered and proud of their community and less demoralized by people who would virtually shit all over the figurative walls-- without demanding they take on a big burdensome cleanup duty on their own?

Gavin stonewalled technical experts like myself that inquired about it after answering only a couple questions, so we can only figure out so much.

I think at the end of the day we should simply consider Gavin complicit in Wright's fraud. From that perspective there really isn't much to explain.  Sure, he was probably tricked at the time, but in the time since he's failed to withdraw his claims beyond saying that maybe he was tricked and it shouldn't matter.  His endorsement continues to be cited as a central factor in other people's belief.

I say 'probably tricked at the time'; because in spite of my low opinion of Gavin's character and capability I still have a hard time believing that he'd knowingly go along with such a transparent scam-- it just had too low a chance of achieving anything.  Wright apparently tried his con on other people unsuccessfully before Gavin.

Zectro posted a set of instructions for how to perform a fake signing that would have worked given what we (little) know about the irresponsible process Gavin used: https://twitter.com/Zectro1/status/1192576225413222405

Instead of 'short ids'  one would probably use an output counter for that-- saves having to deal with collisions. It's cheap/simple to maintain the counter itself (there is one for the total txn count displayed in the updatetip log entries).

Even with no reuse of old spent ids (which would make maintaining the counter complicated), every input could be referenced using 31 bits right now. ... pretty big improvement over 264 bits currently used by bitcoin (or the 258 or whatever in the this new encoding).

I want to say when Pieter crunched the numbers doing that it was an additional 30% savings!

You could probably do a bit better by transmitting with transactions the highest counter in the transaction separately, and code all the other inputs as varint-like difference below that value. (Or if you want to be really elaborate: code the all the input indexes for the transaction differentially in descending order, plus log2(inputs!) bits to encode which goes to which.)

But you'd have to have an index on disk of counter->txid which would take up a lot of space, and take time to update.  I think maintaining through reorgs it wouldn't be too complicated, because it would just ride along with the rest of the state. ... e.g. the txindex gets updated in that way.

When using this with loose txn (rather than in blocks) you'd also run into issues where the encodings weren't compatible between different peers who were on different near-tip forks.  One way to handle that might be using a bit per input to indicate if the counter or full txid was used, and use full inputs on loose transactions for inputs with counter values too close to your current tip.

The additional savings is substantial.  But because it would require fixed overhead even if you weren't using it (the counter->id index, which both potential senders and potential receivers would have to have), it's a little more difficult to reason about its prospects for deployment.   The version blockstream put out has the advantage of being extremely self-contained in the codebase, and having no overhead (except the code) if you're not using it... so it's a realistic prospect to have all nodes adopt this and use it on a case by case basis.

I guess from my perspective, I proposed this sort of thing concretely in 2016 (and less concretely probably years before) and it took all this time for it to get implemented at all and there still isn't any real prospect of its use outside of satellite. If input reference compression had been a part of it .. it still probably wouldn't be done.

They have to both care and have the intelligence to understand the source of it.  If the motivation behind the stupid posts is that they're intentionally trying to manipulate people, troll, or because they're just dumb as a box of rocks... it's not likely to work.

And, of course, other posters know this-- so in a lot of cases people just don't bother to issue the well deserved ridicule even where the source might be responsive to it.  Instead they get responses with more confused people.

I think if we could always reliably and consistently tell who was irredeemably stupid, manipulating, or trolling then it wouldn't be a big deal-- removing their posts would be sufficient. But there is a huge grey area where we can't tell.

I've wondered if some of these are machine generated. GP2-Large tweaked for a particular subject can do some impressive writing, especially with a bit of manual fixups. If they're not yet-- they probably will be soon.

The idea that online communities can deal with junk content by just letting all readers figure it out on their own has been a bad idea for a long time, but it's on the verge of getting significantly worse.  It isn't that readers can't be trusted to sort out junk from not junk without help, by in large they can-- but it is a massive waste of their time. Unless you want to optimize for a community of spammers, idiots, and other persons whos time is utterly worthless you need to do something.

Merit is an example of something. But it's one-sided.

Right. Apparently I screwed up by using the word "demerit" in my post. Removing merits is not something I consider particularly useful.